Investing in Poverty Reaps Rich Rewards

ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 26 — Ohio's Marianist fathers take vows of poverty just like Franciscans, and in that spirit, they practice frugality and scrimp for savings. Unlike most friars, however the Marians also invest and bring in hefty returns that they turn back over to the Church.

Associated Press reported that in late April the order gave $5 million to the University of Dayton, on top of $12.5 million donated earlier to the school in the past year and a half. The money will be used to pay for scholarships and general expenses, according to the university.

The university was founded by the order, officially called the Servants of Mary, which still helps staff the school. “We live very, very simply,” Marianist Father Ken Templin told Associated Press. “We eat lots of pasta. We spend very little money on clothing, very little money on what we would call recreation and culture stuff … Gospel values go counterculture to materialism, consumerism — having everything you want when you want it. With us, there's a resistance to that.”

Nun Says Castro Put Cuba ‘In the Trashcan’

AKRON BEACON JOURNAL, May 2 — Cuba's communist leaders have an unlikely neighbor in what was once Havana's upper-class Nuevo Vedado district — a convent of five cloistered Dominican nuns.

And, the Akron daily reported, one of those nuns is Texas-bred Sister Maria Rosario Fernandez, who left Havana as a teen-ager but returned four years ago to pray for her native country.

Sister Fernandez, now 60, fled Havana at age 18 as communist dictator Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. She returned in 1998, the year of Pope John Paul II's historic visit to the Caribbean island nation.

The Dominican nun said that Castro's physical aging mirrors the deterioration his regime has wrought on Cuban society since he assumed power.

“He's just dilapidated — like the island,” Sister Fernandez told Knight Ridder Newspapers. “When I left, he was 33 and so handsome. This man could have done something beautiful. He turned everything into the trashcan. … To take God out of the home and country, to me that is a big mistake.”

Abuse Allegations Involve Less than Half of 1% of Priests

ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 28 — Deploying its reporters across the United States to survey Catholic bishops and other officials about the extent of recent sex scandals, Associated Press has found that bishops have passed along complaints to police and district attorneys concerning “at least 260 clergymen,” many of whom are already retired or off-duty.

While some dioceses did not give information, Associated Press estimated that the number of priests disciplined since the scandal erupted in the press in January 2001 as “higher than 177.”

The journalists concluded that “even if the figure were higher, it would still likely represent less than half of 1% of the 46,075 priests in the United States. And many of the complaints come from decades ago.”